A One-Off Alien Signal Could Possibly Indicate Extinction
New York, NY, Feb 23, 2026 – Editor’s Note: The following story first ran on MSN’s News website on Feb 4, 2026, and was written by James Thompson. The original piece can be seen here: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/a-one-off-alien-signal-would-tell-more-about-extinction-than-contact/ar-AA1VDYzw
The initial undeniable occurrence of alien technology is most probably going to be a statistical anomaly. That contradictory assumption is the heart of the so-called “Eschatian Hypothesis,” of astrophysicist David Kipping, a reformulation of the way to interpret any such future technosignature. Rather than assuming that a harmonious civilized society would greet them with a non-threatening, representative, and familiar type of “hello” the hypothesis assumes that first contact is a typical detection-bias problem: the brightest, rare, and most extreme examples of a population are the first ones to be observed, even when the examples themselves are not typical of the population.
There is a long tradition of such misleadings in astronomy. The first exoplanets such as the ones around pulsars were not discovered due to the prevalence of pulsar planets, but because pulsars are exquisitely precise clocks. Similarly, the evolved giant stars are the best place to watch naked-eye because even though only a one per cent. of all stars live that life, they are the most evident in the heavens; the sky is not dominated by the most common. The step that Kipping is taking is to use this same logic in relation to technology: the periods that civilizations devote the majority of their lives to being quietly active, and the brief periods scanning as loud, cause the surveys to be selective in their detection of those times of “loud,” whether of victory, of panic, or of breakdown.
The imbalance in Kipping is expressed in his toy model. Only one-millionth of the lifetime of a conspicuously radiating civilization must be spent in the loud interval to be able to become that more noticeable phase on interstellar distances. A signal caused by such a spike of energy is like a transient: brief, difficult to repeat, and, perhaps, related to a terminal episode rather than normal everyday life.
The puzzle is not well depicted using any artifact more than the Wow! signal of 1977: a very narrowband pulse, 72 seconds, which has not been recaptured in decades of listening. It has also been argued recently that a natural mechanism, known as “superradiance” in neutral hydrogen, would produce a bright, coherent flare near the hydrogen line when the conditions are right, that is, during a triggering event. This valuable engineering lesson is not the exact process, but the trend: one-off occurrences are necessarily hard to test, and a galaxy of transients can create false landmarks that will appear significant just because they will be remembered.
At this point, modern SETI starts to resemble looking at an individual frequency with a radio-scope less than silently waiting than it does like running an industrial pipeline of anomalies. Time-domain surveys are constructed to observe change, and change is what the Eschatian framing is more concerned with. The current number of alerts sent per night by the Zwicky Transient Facility to the public via “alert brokers” reaches in the range of one million, which with Rubin Legacy Survey of Space and Time is expected to hit about 10 million alerts per night. Within such a context, the search problem becomes “Can a telescope detect something?” to “Can workflows sort the rare from the merely weird fast enough to enable follow-up?”
A good and graphic example of the importance of this is given by optical SETI. Several years of observations of over 1300 sun-like stars found that two rapid, almost identical brightness pulses were separated by 4.4 seconds in the light of HD 89389, that was observed with a sampling period of 100micro seconds. The outcome is peculiar both in that the fine structure of the former pulse recurred in the latter, and in that nothing noticeable in simultaneous imagery presented an evident movable offender. The usefulness of the report extends beyond the stars discussed: fast photometry opens up the “search space” to include timescales on which traditional surveys do not traditionally search, as well as developing new types of instrumental and environmental false positives which must be confirmed by multi-station observations.
This tension is giving rise to two complementary strategies. One is spatial-and-temporal triage: some techniques like the SETI Ellipsoid calculate the distance using specific Gaia positions to determine when specific stars would be the best to watch in case an external civilization synchronized transmissions with a known cosmic event. The other is wider and more agnostic: consider the sky a stream of anomalies, create systems, both human and algorithmic, that can identify the outliers, hold their context and make prompt confirmation attempts before the universe shifts once more.
At that, it is the Eschatian Hypothesis, which is not a pessimistic narrative so much as it is the narrative of selection effects. A first technosignature, had it come in the form of a short flare or a weird pulse pair, would tell us much more of what is easiest to notice than as to that which is most likely to exist.
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